thinkbroadband

BT Infinity Option 3, the fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) product that is the BT
Retail offering to utilise the Openreach FTTH roll-out has launched with a
price of £35 a month.

The Openreach FTTH roll-out is relatively limited at this time, but coverage
is expanding. People in Highams Park and Leytonstone in London, Ilford in
Essex, Ashford in Middlesex, Forest Hill, Chester, York, St. Austell and Exeter
will have access to the service.

The Infinity Option 3 product from BT Retail offers 100 Mbps
downstream and 15 Mbps upstream and the monthly fee of £35 (18 month contract)
includes unlimited evening and weekend calls, unlimited usage and a free
connection. The router supplied is the Home Hub 3, with the engineer who visits
to install the last few metres of fibre, including an Openreach fibre
termination device. There are no changes to the Infinity Option 1 and Option 2
products which continue to be based around the Openreach fibre-to-the-cabinet
(FTTC) products, though we expect price announcements for the up to 80 Mbps
variants to follow in the next couple of months.

BT Retail has some 300,000 people on its fibre products, which makes it the
largest fibre based provider after Virgin Media with its fibre to the node,
cable architecture. While we have seen some broadband users not bother with
upgrading to FTTC, in areas where FTTH is available the reliability and the
removal of line length affecting your speeds make FTTH much more attractive.
The full fibre solution is also immune to the sort of radio frequency (RF)
noise that can mean your ADSL/ADSL2+/VDSL2 sits resyncing when your neighbours
security light flickers on at night.

The Openreach FTTH product will be available from other providers in the
same way that the FTTC product is, BT Retail are the first to announce their
product.

Comments

Posted by
herdwick over 5 years ago
http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/consumerProducts/displayTopic.do?topicId=33828

external fibre "modem" ?

Posted by
andrew ( staff member)
over 5 years ago
Modem is not the correct technical word, but what BT Retail are calling the fibre termination unit - another white openreach box.

The external box terminates the fibre from the street, then another short fibre lead links to the internal Openreach unit.

This means when peoples dogs eat the cable, only that short 2 or 3m of fibre needs replacing, and avoids need for splicing in the home.

Posted by
TheGift73 over 5 years ago
Yea, but their 'Unlimited' service on Option 3 is actually limited to 100GB's per month. I see little point in having such speeds when you are limited as to the amount you are allowed to use.
I signed up to their Option 3 last year only to hit my limit after 3 weeks at which time they throttled me to a dead crawl.
Had to email the then chairman Ian Livingston to get out of the 18 month contract I signed up to.

Posted by
TheGift73 over 5 years ago
Had I of tried to get out of it via the help line, I would have still been stuck with them. There is no mention of the 100GB limit in their ToS or is it mentioned on the site. Luckily I saved the chat window messages that I had when signing up online and emailed that over to him as well as proof that I was lied to by the sales rep.

Posted by
TheGift73 over 5 years ago
Something to bear in mind when using Unlimited connections.
Went with BEBroadband after that, and had no issues since. I save all my RAW files in the Cloud, so I need to upload quite a bit, plus HDTV is a biggie in our household (legal) so hitting a small limit like 100GB is easily done in a short amount of time.
Sorry about multiple posts (char limit)

Posted by
andrew ( staff member)
over 5 years ago
BT Total Option 3 is a different product to BT Infinity Option 3.

Posted by
undecidedadrian over 5 years ago
Also the limit on BT total broadband was dropped in April in favour of a truly unlimted package with traffic shaping in peak times.

As for the Infinity Option 3 I wonder when the 80/20 product is launched next year then it will be as Infinity option 3 as well with that price tag.

If it is I will happily stick on the 40/10 product.

Posted by
cyberdoyle over 5 years ago
Presumably people won't need to pay for a landline either, so if the 100 meg limit issue can be cleared up then this is very good value. Q is, is there a 100 meg limit/FUP and is there a landline rental on top?

Posted by
GMAN99 over 5 years ago
Good price! Better than I imagined actually. @cd at the moment I think you will still need a landline but they are trialling a voice over fibre service, if successful it will be up to Ofcom to say whether it can be used the sticking point being the battery backup side of things.

Can't see there being a 100Gb limit on it myself

Posted by
andrew ( staff member)
over 5 years ago
Line rental is a pre-requisite, not from Openreach but BT Retail. Phone calls are seen as the profit generator.

TalkTalk will be the same.

Posted by
TheGift73 over 5 years ago
@andrew No, the data transfers weren't stopped completely, but I was throttled down massively. Could hardly watch a 360p YouTube video. Regarding the FUP; I know. Forgot to mention that, but I did say it in the emails I sent to Mr Livingstone last year as well as no mention in the ToS.

Posted by
TheGift73 over 5 years ago
@undecidedadrian Still the issue of Traffic Shaping. To me that is a limitation. They need to choose their words carefully. It's amazing that ISP's have been allowed to get away with the wording they use for so long.

@cyberdoyle It's 100GB not 100MB. Unsure as to what they actually do now, but @undecidedadrian says the restriction has been dropped.

Posted by
andrew ( staff member)
over 5 years ago
The link there was a reason for including it, as it lays out what traffic management they do.

Posted by
jrawle over 5 years ago
If a connection is unlimited, that should mean the amount you can download in a month equals speed x seconds in a month. Otherwise it's limited.

If I pay for unlimited gym membership, but then they say I can only use it for an hour each day between 6 and 9pm, that's not unlimited. So why can broadband providers still false-advertise?

Posted by
GMAN99 over 5 years ago
Nothing wrong with FUP and shaping for me, if you want a truly unlimited service buy a leased Ethernet circuit, remember this is actually peanuts in terms of what you are getting. Want more.. pay more :)

Posted by
creakycopperline over 5 years ago
and further feed the fat cats at BT,

Posted by
TheGift73 over 5 years ago
@GMAN99 agree with the last bit of your comment. Although I am getting the same speeds as I was with BT last year, I am actually unlimited. There has never been any throttling whatsoever or warning regarding usage. Pretty sure that they haven't ever had to warn/ limit any one yet (according to their forums). The price is OK at £27 P/M and I can adjust upload/ download speeds via my control panel.

Posted by
TheGift73 over 5 years ago
As far as I know, only BEBroadband and SKY have truly unlimited usage. As long as you aren't blatantly taking the micky.

Posted by
GMAN99 over 5 years ago
Hopefully BE can pull off a FTTP/FTTC variant of what you have now.

I would have thought most ISP's that want to stay in business in this cut throat priced industry will have to have some FUP to stop the minority thrashing their connections.

Posted by
andrew ( staff member)
over 5 years ago
If going to the full definition, then even Be and Sky are not unlimited, since you are limited by the capacity of their backhaul and what other users are doing.

Posted by
TheGift73 over 5 years ago
@andrew True, but have never felt an effect from that yet. Pretty sure the network contention is a lot better as well, but that may also be down to not many people being with BEBroadband in my town.

Posted by
herdwick over 5 years ago
Openreach brownfield FTTP pricing is lower for "transitional" product taken with a landline, compared to "data product" without - about £100 pa lower.

Posted by
epyon over 5 years ago
OK stop

there is NO FUP

there was a FUP 100GB (2008)
then FUP 300GB (2010)

but now theres none

people need to update there info.

Posted by
soltakr over 5 years ago
Sometime I can hit just under 800 and BE don't mind..so far. I call that excessive as norm is 600. So even tho I can go higher I don't, would be nice to know current option 3 person max they did and not get letter or email. FUP also comes up for downloading a lot during peak so let's say you keep dl to off peak does cup still kick in.

Posted by
undecidedadrian over 5 years ago
BT said that they abandoned the FUP as such a small amount of people were exceeding 300 gig a month it wasn't worth monitoring.

I did an awful lot of downloading of games from Steam in the first month on Infinity and nothing happened as slowdown or letters.

Posted by
CaptainW over 5 years ago
@ Andrew - Sky advertise their service is unlimited because they do not data cap or knowingly throttle your connection and they are quite open about that. They've never advertised otherwise.

Posted by
Oddball over 5 years ago
Well as long as they keep throttling P2P to dial up speeds during the days and at weekends I will stick with my slower and cheaper completely unlimited Be ADSL2+ connection.

After all a 300mb file on 11mbits via uTorrent is still better and faster than BT can offer on their FFTH service during the day.

Posted by
fibrebunny over 5 years ago
Seems rather cheap, particularly in contrast to some FTTC isp offerings. They haven't left themselves much room for pricing 80megs given the disadvantages of FTTC over FTTH and lower speed. Most people expect a catch with ISP's these days. So throttling is possibly not so much of a surprise.

Posted by
GMAN99 over 5 years ago
Everything broadband is too cheap fibrebunny that is the problem. Come in too high in a cheap as chips market and no-one will buy it.

Plus you don't get a choice of FTTC/P so what if you were forced (oh the agony) to have FTTP and it was much more expensive than FTTC which you would have been happy with.

Posted by
soltakr over 5 years ago
Read on BE forum that BT do throttle filesite like netload/filesonic. like Oddball said i rather have truly unlimited BE at slower speed than a unlimited with FUP.

years ago i was on 2mb unlimited when 8 came & i was paying loads, yet maxing out my connection no throttle.

To bring up unlimited on BE above, yea for me its unlimited for me monday to saturday to my lines max, sunday is only day when im limited by BE. tho i have to say im not usually downloading anything on saturday so it could be like sunday.

Sol

Posted by
volatileacid over 5 years ago
Sol, most of your understanding is based on theory. I was with Be* since 2003 and yes they're a fantastic ISP. Now 8 years later, since I've moved home and infinity is available, I've gone with BT's FTTC offering.. Man the service is FAST! I was downloading the other day 4.6 megabytes every second. I haven't yet tried filesonic even though I'm a premium subscriber - but I will when I get home and let you know.

Posted by
undecidedadrian over 5 years ago
It's amazing how many people are still saying that BT hasa a FUP even though several people have said it has benn abandoned.

Makes you wonder if people even read the posts or do they hate BT so much they won't belive it.

Posted by
Oddball over 5 years ago
I'd rather a 300GB FUP than a throttle connection thanks. Likewise I think it's outrageous throttling the 40GB crowd (I.E. my fathers FTTC). Like an above poster said. If they want to blow that 40GB on P2P in one go they should bloomin' well be able to do so at any time they like!

Posted by
themanstan over 5 years ago
Hmmm.... that would make an interesting product option, don't you think?

You choose your speed, then whether to have a fixed usage package or P2P throttled unlimited package.